You can want the world to change and still feel embarrassed by the language we use for people who try to change it.
Perhaps you’ve had an idea for making something better, only to find yourself recoiling from what it might mean to pursue it. Becoming a founder is not the appeal. Nor is building a personal brand around the insight, pitching investors, cultivating a following, or describing an ordinary human frustration as a market opportunity. Calling yourself a visionary would be the hardest sentence to say out loud. Maybe you’ve encountered enough people who do those things to want nothing to do with them.
That doesn’t mean you lack ambition. You may be furious about how much of life is organized around unnecessary difficulty. You notice procedures nobody can adequately justify, organizations that seem to exist principally to administer problems they’ve helped create, and expectations that people have become so accustomed to meeting that they scarcely remember those expectations could be different.
You have ideas about what could change. Some are modest. Others would require reconsidering arrangements that have existed for decades. But somewhere between noticing the problem and imagining yourself doing something about it, you encounter an identity you have no desire to inhabit.
We have developed a peculiar vocabulary for changing the world. The people who do it are supposed to be exceptional, tireless, willing to take risks, comfortable promoting themselves, and unusually convinced of their own ideas. They’re expected to turn dissatisfaction into opportunity, opportunity into an organization, and organizational success into evidence that they were right.
If that picture makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you conclude that changing things on any meaningful scale is not really for you.
Meanwhile, other people have devoted their lives to becoming exactly that kind of person. The training is real: noticing inefficiencies, identifying unmet needs, challenging assumptions, persuading others to support improbable ideas, building things that didn’t previously exist. Sacrifices were made, uncertainty was accepted, and the world turned out to be considerably more changeable than most people imagine. A few of them have accomplished extraordinary things.
Yet they may have acquired a different limitation. The practice at recognizing opportunities that can support enterprises made it harder to recognize improvements that cannot. They know how to build a business around an expensive problem. They have fewer ways to pursue a future in which that problem is no longer expensive, or no longer exists.
This is an odd predicament for two groups that may have very little patience for one another. One has good reasons to distrust the entrepreneurial imagination and may have allowed that distrust to narrow its own sense of what it can accomplish. The other has developed considerable confidence in its capacity to change the world and may have accepted an unnecessarily narrow definition of what changing the world involves.
Neither limitation is inevitable, and neither is simply a matter of attitude. People who hesitate to take initiative may face material risks, institutional resistance, and responsibilities they cannot afford to neglect. People who build enterprises must find ways to finance their work and sustain the organizations responsible for it. Neither can simply wish away the conditions under which they operate.
But there is something worth examining in the fact that our culture has made one particular approach to making change so prominent that even rejecting it can determine what people imagine themselves capable of doing.
Think of the person who knows that a workplace policy serves no defensible purpose, but doesn’t regard changing it as the kind of accomplishment that belongs on a résumé. Or the person who understands how to organize a service without the intermediary everyone currently depends on, but cannot imagine who would fund the transition. Or the person who spends years helping people navigate a dysfunctional institution, develops an extraordinary understanding of its failures, and never considers that this knowledge might qualify them to help redesign it.
Now think of the entrepreneur who notices the same dysfunction and immediately recognizes a business opportunity. They may be the only one of these people who has been taught to treat their observation as the beginning of something consequential. And the solution they can most readily finance may be the one that leaves the dysfunction intact.
We encourage people to solve problems, and provide considerably less encouragement to ask why those problems must exist. We celebrate people who create indispensable services, and struggle to recognize the achievement of making an intermediary dispensable.
Asking whether we need more entrepreneurs, or whether entrepreneurship has become too culturally influential, keeps the enterprise at the center. A better question is why the capacity to imagine and pursue consequential change has become so closely associated with a particular kind of person, a particular kind of organization, and a particular way of getting rewarded.
The problem is not that we’ve run out of ingenious people, or that the people trying to improve things are insufficiently sincere. We may simply have become exceptionally good at teaching people how to make themselves useful to the world as it exists, without developing comparable ways to help them make a different world possible.
And the difficulty extends well beyond what people believe about themselves. The ability to recognize a worthwhile change is distributed much more widely than the ability to organize the resources, cooperation, and authority needed to bring it about.
Why the workaround gets funded
Suppose you notice that people are spending an extraordinary amount of time appealing decisions that should never have been made against them.
You could build software to help them prepare appeals. You could develop a service that identifies errors, gathers documentation, and makes the process less exhausting. You could sell it to the people affected, their employers, or the institutions responsible for handling the appeals. There’s a recognizable business here. You can identify customers, estimate demand, calculate the cost of serving them, and explain why someone might pay.
Now suppose you want to reduce the number of unjustified decisions in the first place. You might need to change how the original decisions are made, establish different standards of evidence, alter incentives, redistribute authority, or give affected people more effective ways to challenge the rules themselves.
The possible benefit could be much greater. But who is your customer? The people who would benefit most may have little money to spend. The organizations capable of financing the change may not receive the savings. Some may actually benefit from the existing arrangement. And even those who want to cooperate may lack the authority to change the relevant rules.
The first idea has a straightforward business model. The second has a coordination problem. That difference can determine which idea gets built, regardless of which would do more good.
This is one of the less glamorous ways economic arrangements influence innovation. They don’t merely affect whether an idea succeeds after someone attempts it. They affect which possibilities people learn to regard as worth attempting.
Consider a worker who notices that a scheduling procedure produces unnecessary uncertainty for hundreds of colleagues. The worker may understand the problem better than the people with authority to change it. The colleagues may overwhelmingly prefer a different arrangement. The organization might even save money if the procedure were redesigned. None of that guarantees that the relevant people can coordinate, that the savings will be recognized, or that the decision-makers will have sufficient reason to cooperate.
Now suppose an outside company offers software that helps workers accommodate the uncertainty. It can identify a buyer, demonstrate a reduction in administrative costs, and negotiate a contract without needing to reconsider who ought to control scheduling. Its product may substantially improve people’s lives. The reason this improvement is feasible has little to do with its being more valuable than the alternative. The existing distribution of purchasing power and decision-making authority makes it easier to organize.
We often talk about innovation as though identifying a valuable improvement were the principal challenge. Sometimes identifying the improvement is the easy part. The challenge is finding an arrangement in which the people capable of making it happen have sufficient resources, authority, and reason to do so. When those conditions are absent, we can mistake the difficulty of organizing a better alternative for evidence that the alternative itself is unrealistic.
Suppose the intervention succeeds so completely that the service is no longer needed. Eliminating a problem can create enormous economic value. The difficulty is that creating value and capturing enough of it to sustain an organization are different accomplishments. A benefit can be distributed across thousands of people. It can arrive years later. It can take the form of an expense nobody needs to incur, an illness that never develops, a dispute that never arises, or a dependency that never forms. Those benefits are real, and they are difficult to measure, attribute, finance, and capture. Meanwhile a workaround has an immediate purchaser with an identifiable problem, and its value can be demonstrated through transactions, usage, and relief from costs people already recognize.
That doesn’t make elimination always preferable. Some forms of complexity serve important purposes. Eligibility rules can help allocate scarce resources. Appeals procedures can protect people from arbitrary decisions. Intermediaries can perform valuable coordination that would otherwise fall on individuals. We should not confuse removing a procedure with eliminating the need it serves, and we should not assume a procedure is necessary simply because many people have become dependent on navigating it.
A more troubling possibility arises when the complexity of an arrangement becomes evidence of the market opportunity for managing it. The more expensive the problem, the greater the willingness to pay. The more frequently people encounter it, the more attractive the recurring revenue. The more difficult it becomes to navigate without assistance, the more valuable a trusted intermediary may appear. A problem can become commercially attractive precisely because the conditions that would make the product unnecessary have not been established. And once the workaround becomes a successful enterprise, those conditions may become harder to change.
The tax code is the clearest documented case of that sequence, and I wrote about it separately: Better Alternatives.
When success becomes another constraint
Imagine building a company that helps people navigate a dysfunctional institution.
You begin with an obvious need. Your product works. People appreciate it. You employ others, develop specialized expertise, and become increasingly trusted. Over time your organization acquires customers, investors, contractual obligations, and employees whose livelihoods depend on the service continuing.
You may still want the original dysfunction to disappear. But now its disappearance has consequences for people who depend on you. What began as your attempt to improve an arrangement has become another arrangement you are responsible for sustaining.
This is not necessarily a failure of character. You cannot reasonably disregard the people who have come to rely on your organization. Nor is it inevitable that the business must oppose reform. It could diversify, change its services, support structural changes, or deliberately wind down a function that is no longer needed. Those choices involve real costs. An organization may become less free to pursue the improvement that originally motivated it as more people acquire legitimate interests in its continued operation.
The same dilemma appears outside private enterprise. A nonprofit may become dependent on funding that lasts only while the problem does. A government department may acquire responsibilities, staff, and obligations that make relinquishing a function difficult. A professional association may come to defend requirements that make its members indispensable.
These organizations don’t secretly want problems to persist. Organizational success creates constituencies, dependencies, and expectations that complicate the pursuit of alternatives, and some of those dependencies are produced by the very improvements the organization has achieved.
We can measure how much more effectively an organization performs its established functions. We can measure the expansion of its services, its reach, its revenue, its efficiency, and its operational stability. We have a harder time recognizing when those functions should change, when other people should gain authority over them, or when the organization should help make some of its own services unnecessary.
Making an institution better at what it does and making it better at determining whether what it does is still needed are different accomplishments. We have developed extensive expertise in the first. The second can threaten the very measures by which success is recognized.
Why asking people to be more ambitious isn’t enough
There is a temptation, at this point, to tell people to stop settling for workarounds and start pursuing structural change. That would reproduce something of the problem.
People don’t become reluctant to challenge institutions simply because they have accepted an insufficiently ambitious conception of themselves. They may depend on those institutions for income, healthcare, housing, professional standing, or legal permission to act. They may understand perfectly well what ought to change while lacking the time, security, resources, or collective authority needed to pursue it.
The worker who recognizes an unnecessary procedure may be taking a real risk by challenging it. The patient who understands a recurring administrative failure may not have the energy to organize against it. The public servant who sees a better arrangement may not have the authority to implement it. Telling these people to become innovators does little to alter their circumstances. Nor does telling a founder to pursue more socially valuable opportunities resolve the problem of financing changes whose benefits cannot readily be captured by an enterprise.
The two groups encounter different manifestations of the same difficulty. The first may possess valuable knowledge without the means to act on it. The second may possess considerable resources and organizational capacity, and find that those resources are conditional on pursuing a narrower range of outcomes than they consider worthwhile.
In both cases, imagining a better arrangement is the smaller part of the question. The larger part is whether someone can participate in bringing it about without absorbing costs, risks, and obligations that leave the attempt untenable.
We admire people who risk their own resources to pursue uncertain ideas, and there are good reasons to admire initiative, perseverance, and the willingness to act despite the possibility of failure. But an arrangement that requires exceptional personal sacrifice to accomplish widely beneficial changes is not necessarily producing the right amount or distribution of initiative.
Why should changing an unnecessary institutional requirement depend on someone being unusually brave, wealthy, persuasive, well-connected, or willing to turn the effort into a business? Why should the person who understands a problem most intimately also be expected to acquire the resources, organizational expertise, and institutional authority needed to solve it? And why should the absence of such a person be treated as evidence that no workable alternative exists?
The accomplishments we celebrate also influence the kinds of initiative people learn to recognize in themselves. When changing the world is primarily represented through stories about founders, inventors, and exceptional leaders, people whose contributions don’t resemble those stories may underestimate what they know. Those who do resemble the stories may overestimate what their individual initiative can accomplish without changing the conditions under which everyone else must act.
Neither is a satisfactory account of human agency. One mistakes the absence of an entrepreneurial identity for the absence of a capacity to contribute to change. The other risks mistaking the capacity to build a successful organization for the authority to decide what changes the world needs.
Innovation beyond the enterprise
The worker who recognizes the unnecessary scheduling procedure wouldn’t need to persuade a founder to create a product around it. There could be reliable ways for workers to initiate experiments in how their workplace is organized, participate in evaluating the results, and obtain the authority and resources needed to implement improvements. The people who repeatedly appeal incorrect decisions could collectively establish which patterns of failure deserve investigation, require the responsible institution to account for them, and participate in revising the standards that produce them. Organizations could be compensated for making transactions unnecessary rather than only for handling more of them efficiently.
These possibilities involve different forms of innovation. Some require new technologies. Others require changes to contracts, financing, organizational authority, professional responsibilities, or the distribution of decision-making power. Some can be pursued through businesses. Others may be better suited to cooperatives, public agencies, unions, professional institutions, or arrangements that don’t fit comfortably into any existing organizational category.
The distinction is between treating the enterprise as the presumed vehicle for consequential change and recognizing that the vehicle itself may need to be invented, revised, or replaced.
A successful approach might take the form of a company, a new kind of contract, a change in public administration, a collectively governed service, or a modification to an institution that already exists. It might not produce anything its contributors could own, or a new organization at all. That should not make it less recognizable as an accomplishment.
What makes a difficult change possible
Everything above explains why some changes are easier to pursue. It doesn’t yet explain what makes a harder one possible, and the difference matters for anyone who has been told their idea is unrealistic.
Three questions usually arrive as one. What else could exist? What would make it realizable? And who can change the conditions that decide what becomes realizable? The first is imagination, the second is coordination, the third is power. Most arguments about what is realistic answer the second and skip the third.
Start with the distinction that disappears. An improvement can be difficult to implement without being impractical. Those are different claims, and only the second is a reason to stop. The first is a statement about the arrangement currently in place.
The three people who agree that a requirement is unnecessary and disagree about what to do next are not disagreeing about the requirement. One imagines a different arrangement, one anticipates resistance, one has found a route that doesn’t require the arrangement to change. The third appears practical because the proposal fits an existing purchasing decision and an existing line of authority. That makes it easier to organize. Whether it is better is a separate question.
So the question is what turns a difficult change into a feasible one. Five things, and they are separable.
Visibility. The cost has to become legible to someone who can act on it. A recurring failure that nobody counts is not a problem the institution has.
Collective power. People who each bear a small share of a cost rarely act alone. A union, an association, a coalition of affected parties, or a purchaser large enough to matter can act where an individual cannot.
Purchasing criteria. Whoever buys can require something different. Procurement is one of the few levers that changes an arrangement without requiring its owners to agree.
Cost-sharing. An improvement whose benefits are spread across thousands of people needs an arrangement that pools the cost, whether that is public funding, insurance, a cooperative, or a levy.
Contestability. The rule has to be open to challenge by the people it governs. Without that, the other four can be satisfied and the arrangement still holds.
None of these is guaranteed by the others, which is the practical reason to keep them apart.
It is also the reason not to treat every obstacle as a financing problem. A change can fail because no one will pay for it, because no one has the authority to permit it, because no one knows whether it would work, or because someone benefits from the current arrangement. Those are four different problems. Funding is not authority. Authority is not knowledge. And knowledge is not enough against an interest.
Most of this essay is about the first. The others deserve the same attention, and they usually get it from people who are not entrepreneurs: organizers, public servants, auditors, researchers, and the occasional well-placed customer.
The constructive proposition is smaller than a call for more ways to organize change. The conditions deciding who can change things are themselves arrangements, and arrangements can be revised. That is a smaller claim than optimism and a larger one than resignation.
What should count as success?
We could begin by becoming more demanding about the evidence we accept as proof that an innovation has improved the world.
A company may have many customers because its product is useful. It may also have many customers because people cannot avoid the problem its product helps them navigate. A service may have high retention because people appreciate it. It may also retain users because leaving would expose them to costs or risks they cannot afford. An institution may become increasingly efficient while preserving requirements that no longer serve a defensible purpose. None of these measures is meaningless, and none establishes by itself that the underlying arrangement is desirable.
It helps to separate three achievements that get reported as one: performance, burden, and the capacity of affected people to change the arrangement that produces the burden. An appeals tool can cut the time to file from hours to minutes and leave the denial rate untouched. That is a real improvement and a partial one, and saying so is more useful than either celebrating it or dismissing it.
The question is what has happened to the possibilities available to the people affected. Are they less burdened? Do they have more meaningful alternatives? Can they exercise greater control over the decisions that organize their lives? Are they better equipped to question the rules rather than merely comply with them? Can they leave an intermediary without losing capabilities they reasonably need? And when an innovation makes people more capable, does that capacity actually expand their freedom, or does it become the basis for expecting them to manage more?
These questions need not be hostile to successful enterprises. They may reveal ways for those enterprises to contribute more than their existing business models allow. An appeals platform might use its accumulated knowledge to identify preventable errors and support changes to the original decision-making process. A scheduling tool might help workers obtain greater control over their time rather than merely adjust to uncertainty. An intermediary might help its users acquire the knowledge, resources, and collective arrangements needed to depend on it less.
Sometimes an accommodative innovation can become the means of a transformative one. A product that helps people navigate a dysfunctional process may reveal patterns of failure that were previously invisible. A service that establishes trust may create opportunities for cooperation that did not previously exist. An organization capable of coordinating many participants may eventually be able to support changes none could have accomplished independently.
The transition is not automatic. The organization may need a different contract, a different purchaser, a different ownership structure, or a different understanding of whose interests its success is supposed to serve. And people affected by those changes may need more than an opportunity to provide feedback. They may need meaningful authority to determine what should happen next.
A more ambitious conception of innovation therefore cannot be limited to eliminating existing burdens. It also has to consider who gets to decide which burdens are necessary, who bears the costs of changing them, and whether the resulting arrangements remain open to reconsideration. Otherwise today’s liberation from an unnecessary intermediary can become tomorrow’s dependence on a new one.
The aim should not be to eliminate every institution or remove every source of friction. It should be to make institutions capable of accomplishing legitimate purposes without converting their own persistence, authority, or indispensability into ends that people are expected to serve.
That is a demanding standard, and it is not more fanciful than the idea that people might create valuable things that didn’t previously exist. The same imagination extends to the arrangements determining what can be created, who can participate, and what we are able to leave behind.
A different direction for ambition
The person who recoils from the word innovator doesn’t need to become more entrepreneurial. We need more ways for their understanding of what ought to change to become consequential. And the entrepreneur who has spent years building a successful workaround doesn’t need to become less ambitious. They need ways to pursue improvements whose success would undermine their existing business.
There is something each may understand that the other has been encouraged to overlook. The person suspicious of entrepreneurship may recognize how easily valuable human purposes become subordinated to the requirements of maintaining an enterprise. The entrepreneur may understand how much organization, experimentation, cooperation, and persistence can be required to turn an imagined alternative into a functioning reality.
Neither understanding is sufficient. Recognizing that an arrangement is unnecessary does not establish how to replace it. Knowing how to build something does not establish that it ought to exist. Together, these capacities suggest a larger field of possibilities than either entrepreneurial enthusiasm or disillusionment usually permits.
Their shared predicament is not primarily a shortage of imagination. The means of making change possible remain distributed according to arrangements that may themselves need changing.
We can continue celebrating the people who discover profitable ways to make existing burdens easier to bear. Many of them deserve recognition. We could also become better at supporting people who discover which burdens need not exist, who can help eliminate them, and what new arrangements would allow the people affected to determine their own alternatives.
Some of this work may require creating new enterprises. Some may require changing the incentives of existing ones. And some may require accepting that a socially valuable achievement need not produce a durable business, an indispensable intermediary, or an exceptional individual to whom its benefits can be attributed.
The innovator’s disappointment need not become a rejection of innovation. It can become a more demanding conception of what innovation is for.
Perhaps the next frontier is less about discovering more problems that can sustain organizations than about finding ways to keep solving problems that should no longer sustain organizations. And the people capable of contributing to that work include many who have never considered themselves innovators at all.